511–520 of 578 posts
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IANAL, but as I understand it: a) Yes, if Postgres is exposed to users for some reason. Your changes to Postgres are a derivative work of the original, and thus covered under the AGPL. b) No. Your application is not a derivative work of Postgres, any more than it's a derivative work of whatever OS you're using.
a) is wrong: users are not connecting directly to PG
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Every developer is also an user. And "user" freedom is more important because we use tenths of millions of SLOC and do development work on a small fraction.
The copyright holder is never a user in a discussion about distribution rights, though.
This can be true for a small program on a microcontroller, but 99.9% of FOSS is deployed as part of a big ecosystem.
For each line of code I deploy on production there's 1000 lines of kernel, libraries, daemons, firmware.
As developers, we are 0.1% developers and 99.9% users.
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> Cloud providers must share contributions To be really strict: AGPL only mandates that contributions be shared with the user. The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers. Of course an upstream maintainer can be a user and get the contributions.
> The freedom of users is more important than the freedom of developers. This is misleading. All developers are users as well. Having to use closed source services and tools impacts us a lot.
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This just seems like a blatant violation of the license on grsecuritys part. The license requires them to allow people to share the code. "Technically you could share the code, and then we'll blacklist you" isn't letting people share the code, "technically" their customers can do anything. This sounds like the reasoning of a petulant elementary school kid, not a professional security company.
It sounds pretty reasonable to be honest, youre allowed to share the code and theres no legal reprocussions for doing so but the company should be able to just stop sending you stuff if you do?
You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice [..] and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
This is section 1 of the GPLv2 [1]. This plainly states that if The Company is distributing their code under GPLv2, their customers are plainly permitted to "copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code".
Their whole business model is based on a tortuous reading of this part of section 2:
If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Their claim is that they are shipping their patch set as a separate work from the Linux kernel, so that they're not bound by the requirement that "the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License", and they're free to choose whatever license they want for their patch set. However, since their patch set is in no way a separate work on its own, only a lawyer could make that case without blinking.
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No, I don't consider it a problem at all. Nothing is being used improperly or against the spirit of free software when software freedom is exercised (by a service provider) - that's the whole point. I really think the whole AGPL is simply sour grapes, because most GPL-using businesses have not figured out how to become profitable. ("open source is not a business model.") The anti-corporate, anti-business types see pe…
Consider an extreme example -- someone takes LibreOffice and many other GPL-licensed programs and creates a business where you can only access them through the internet. They make massive (useful changes) to LibreOffice to the point that a vast majority of users switch to the online version because it is objectively better. However, because you can only access their fork of a GPL project over the internet, there is n…
I never knew how much I can't stand "free" software types until today.
The funny thing to me, which I haven't seen anyone else mention yet, is that way, way back in the old days, Grafana started out as a fork of Kibana. Go take a look at the first commit in the Grafana source: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/commit/75d03fc49ab4f95ee4... Anyone want to guess what the third commit was? That's right, it was an Apache 2 license: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/commits/master?after=2bb…
I applaud this decision. I would like to see all major SaaSS projects be AGPLv3. End users still have freedom to user, modify, and distribute the software. Cloud providers must share contributions. This is how I like it.
I have a question regarding AGPL, that I couldn't answer by Googling or reading the license. Let's say that Postgres server is licensed under AGPL, and I modify it to my needs. I have a closed source web application, that is publicly accessible, and uses Postgres for storing data. a) Do I need to publish source code of my version of Postgres? b) Does my application (which relies on Postgres, and my patches) need to a…
Why there's a prevailing hate against xGPL licenses? Almost all of the core infrastructure which runs this Apache/BSD/MIT licensed software is running on xGPL software. I believe that we wouldn't be here without these aggressive copyleft licenses, and some developers embracing this license again is a good thing. I'll always prefer Nextcloud because it's AGPL. Similarly I'll use Grafana with less hesitation since it'l…
I assume the answer to the "why" can be as simple as: being primarily a Silicon Valley software industry forum, HN knows what side its bread is buttered on (namely the side of cobbling together freely available software to make proprietary products).
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That was also my understanding of the GPL, but the AGPL is for me to understand.
If your server runs Linux you don't have to distribute the source code of Linux to the users of the services running on it. If Linux was AGPL you would have to. And yet, you would not have to distribute the source of your closed source software running on the server.
You wouldn't, as system interfaces are specifically excluded as an AGPL enforcement domain. But if the Linux kernel was AGPL, you would have to supply the source code to your NFS clients, since those clients would be served directly by the kernel.
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I'm going to split hairs the other answers don't: you specify you have modified Postgres. My answer is, it entirely depends if your application is considered a "derivative work" of Postgres. This hinges on a couple of things: - does your application directly include AGPL postgres code in any form (headers, binary, etc etc) to its own source or its own runtime process? - keep in mind, in answering the above, that your…
The postgresql driver might be considered derivative work, and thus required to be AGPL as well, because Postgres does not talk some standard protocol that exists outside of it.